The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic (12 page)

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Authors: David Limbaugh

BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic
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The bottom line is this: the Obama administration encouraged and funded transparency, enforcement, and even litigation against private companies while decreasing all those things with respect to unions—all of which reveals not just the administration’s micromanaging approach to governance, but its bitter determination to empower unions and emasculate private firms.
A “TEA PARTY DOWNGRADE”
Credit rating agencies must strenuously safeguard their independence if they are to protect their reputation for unbiased analysis—and that’s a problem for the Obama administration. When Standard & Poor’s decided to downgrade the United States’ credit rating in 2011, the White House and the U.S. Treasury launched a coordinated attack on the agency’s credibility. The campaign first appeared in a memo posted on the Treasury’s website by one of its senior officials, John Bellows. Charging that the downgrade was based on a $2 trillion error, the post said, “Independent of this error, there is no justifiable rationale for downgrading the debt of the United States…. The magnitude of this mistake—and the haste with which S&P changed its principal rationale for action when presented with this error—raise fundamental questions about the credibility and integrity of S&P’s ratings action.”
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Gene Sperling, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, leveled a similar attack on S&P, while a senior administration official declared, “This is a facts-be-damned decision. Their analysis is way off, but they wouldn’t budge.”
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In defense of its actions, S&P president Deven Sharma said the government’s angry response was “the same you would get from any other country or company.” Sharma told the
Wall Street Journal
, “We are supposed to be objective, and others are always trying to convince us why the risk is less than we think it is.”
22
While the Obama administration tried to blame the downgrade on the agency itself or on Republican brinksmanship during budget negotiations, the real problem was the government’s failure to devise a plan to restructure long-term entitlements—and that failure can be laid squarely at the feet of President Obama and the Democrats. S&P official John Chambers said the impasse was a factor in the downgrade—without assessing more fault on either the president or Congress—but indicated this problem has been long in the making and centers on entitlements. Moreover, he admitted to the mistake the administration had highlighted, but explained it made no material difference in the long-term debt-to-GDP ratio, which was a tacit admission that the budget impasse was not the cause of the downgrade—it was our overwhelming debt, driven by entitlements.
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But the White House would not back off. On
Face the Nation
, Bob Schieffer pressed White House adviser David Axelrod on his claim that Republicans were to blame for the downgrade. Schieffer asked, “Are you saying the President bears no responsibility for this, that this was all the fault of the other side?” Axelrod replied, “Listen Bob, what I’m saying is review the history of what happened here … this is essentially a Tea Party downgrade. The Tea Party brought us to the brink of a default.”
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As the S&P stood its ground, the administration increased the pressure. The Securities and Exchange Commission asked S&P to disclose all its associates who were aware of the decision to downgrade the U.S. debt before it was announced, ostensibly to examine the possibility of insider trading. This inquiry was initiated even though the SEC admitted it was not aware of any leak from an S&P insider, nor had it heard of any suspicious trading in connection with the downgrade or its announcement.
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Shortly after the SEC began its probe, S&P president Deven Sharma suddenly announced he would resign. An observer might easily conclude he was forced out under government pressure, though Vice President Biden, while claiming to have no direct knowledge of the matter, said his “instinct” was that disgruntled businesses may have influenced the resignation.
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“A CREEPY, AUTHORITARIAN NUTJOB”
In
Crimes Against Liberty
I discussed how the White House established an official email address and a website dedicated to encourging people to snitch on their neighbors who criticize the administration. Although their campaign died within a few weeks amidst a public outcry, they never gave up.
In September 2011, in a similar spirit, Obama’s reelection campaign launched
AttackWatch.com
, whereby Obama supporters are encouraged to report all attacks against the administration—meaning any expressions of criticism, no matter how warranted. As one critic noted, “Wow, not only are Obama & Co. incredibly thin-skinned; they’re paranoid.”
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Obama for America national field director Jeremy Bird said that the site, which features Orwellian slogans encouraging people to “support the truth,” aims to provide “resources to fight back” against attacks. Even President Obama himself, never hesitating to avail himself of opportunities to demean the dignity of his office, personally entered the fray, tweeting, “We’ve launched a new way to track and respond to attacks. President Obama: #Attack Watch. Check it out:
attackwatch.com
.”
The site doesn’t seem to have improved Obama’s standing among the American people, but its associated Twitter account has provided conservatives with a convenient forum for ridiculing the Attack Watch campaign. As one critic tweeted, “There’s a new Twitter account making President Obama look like a creepy, authoritarian nutjob.”
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THE CRUSADE AGAINST VOTER ID LAWS: “AN AFFRONT TO CIVIC ORDER”
The Obama administration may think it’s worthwhile to engage enemy nations in dialogue, but it has found one target deserving of an all-out assult: American states that defy Obama’s will.
This campaign features a concerted attack on states that commit the cardinal sin of passing voter ID laws. Take Arizona, against which the Obama-Holder Justice Department filed a brief in a 9
th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals case arguing that the state’s law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote preempted federal law. Arizona attorney general Tom Horne said the administration was trying to thwart Arizona’s voter ID laws in an effort to boost the vote among illegal immigrants, who would most likely vote Democrat. “Nobody that I’ve talked to, regardless of political persuasion, can understand how a court can tell us that we can’t make sure that people who vote are citizens,” Horne declared, citing evidence proving that illegal immigrants had indeed registered to vote.
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The campaign against Arizona is no isolated act. The Obama DOJ has overturned South Carolina’s voter ID law, rejected a similar law in Texas, and blocked Georgia’s voter ID law before capitulating when the state fought back in court. These laws generally require voters simply to show one of many possible forms of ID to verify their identity, and some oblige the government to provide free ID to those who request it. Yet Obama’s officials baselessly claim that asking someone to show ID to vote—a mundane act,
National Review
‘s Jonah Goldberg noted, typically required to fly on a plane, rent a car, ride Amtrak, or stay at a hotel—is racially discriminatory.
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The DOJ objects to other anti-voter fraud measures as well. When a tea party group in a district of Harris County, Texas, recruited poll watchers to help root out voting fraud, the Justice Department moved against them as fast as a high-speed train. Poll watchers had credible reasons for concern; there were some 24,000 addresses with more than six registered voters each, more than ten times the number of such houses in most districts. Furthermore, many people registered from vacant lots, numerous people were registered in a seven-bed halfway house, and there were registrations by self-admitted non-citizens, along with other peculiarities. Lo and behold, it was later found that tens of thousands of these fraudulent registrations had been manufactured by a union-connected group called Houston Votes.
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The Texas Democratic Party was the moving complainant against the tea partiers, but that apparently did not raise the suspicions of the hyper-politicized Department of Justice; instead of focusing on the voter fraud allegations, the DOJ launched an investigation into the poll watchers for allegedly intimidating voters.
32
Of course, the DOJ didn’t show the same concern about voter intimidation when it famously dismissed nearly all the charges against the New Black Panther Party, whose members were filmed during the 2008 presidential elections patrolling a Philadelphia voting precinct, one with a nightstick, while taunting white voters that they were about to be ruled by a black man.
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If the DOJ’s activities end up increasing voter fraud, the votes of all legal voters will be devalued. But there are certain groups whose voting rights are zealously defended by the DOJ—for example, non-English speakers. Citing anecdotal evidence that people had been discouraged from voting, DOJ officials in 2010 compelled Ohio’s Cuyahoga County to print bilingual voting ballots under threat of a lawsuit. To make sure the county got the message, DOJ officials also forced it to agree to hire more bilingual poll workers, create a “community-based Spanish-language advisory committee,” and allow federal observers to monitor the county’s elections.
34
While the DOJ found bilingual ballots to be a top priority in Ohio, it didn’t take an interest in press reports that 5,800 dead people still appeared on the state’s voter registration rolls. It had shown the same apathy toward voter fraud the previous year when it abandoned a case against Missouri for failing to clean up its voter rolls, even though a third of the state’s counties reported more registered voters than voting-age residents.
35
Meanwhile, where was the DOJ when immigration officials informed an illegal alien in Tennessee he could still become a U.S. citizen even though he had voted illegally? The government merely required him to “submit a letter of explanation of … when you discovered that you were not a United States Citizen”—as if, opined the
Washington Times
editors, “he hadn’t known.” They concluded, “The Obama administration and liberal bureaucrats are working to help everybody vote, whether or not they are eligible (or even alive). This undermines the rights of legal Americans whose votes are improperly diluted of value by fraud. The scandals are an affront to civic order.”
36
With the 2012 presidential elections approaching, we can expect the Justice Department to continue attacking states that pass voter ID laws and other anti-voter fraud measures, citing the preposterous pretext that such precautions harm minorities. Though a strong majority of Americans—even Democrats—support these laws, Obama and Holder seem anxious to press the matter to pander to their leftist base.
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The DOJ’s antipathy toward states that enforce voter fraud laws or fail to meet its demands for multicultural accommodations reflect the department’s aggressive, politicized law enforcement under the tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder. As J. Christian Adams, a former lawyer for the DOJ’s Voting Rights division, reported in his whistleblower book
Injustice
, “Holder’s term has been marked by racially discriminatory law enforcement, politicized and ideological hiring, court-imposed sanctions on DOJ lawyers, and corrupt decisions to allow American voter rolls to overflow with deceased citizens and ineligible felons.”
38
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION: “OUR OWN GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME OUR ENEMY”
As documented in
Crimes Against Liberty
, a primary target of the administration’s campaign has been Arizona and its immigration law, SB 1070. The DOJ’s lawsuit against the state received a major setback in April 2012 when most of the law was upheld by a U.S. appeals court. Nevertheless, the administration continues to argue that the law allows for racial profiling, even though the bill expressly prohibits the practice. Obama officials further allege that SB 1070 preempts federal law, an accusation dismissed by Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, who notes, “It’s simply the state of Arizona providing some additional law enforcement assistance for the federal government.”
40
But the administration doesn’t want this assistance, because it doesn’t want a secure border at all. Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Arizona, whose department patrols a portion of the U.S.-Mexico border, said the federal government was not only failing to assist his state with border patrol efforts, but was actually impeding them. “What is very troubling is the fact that at a time when we in law enforcement and our state need help from the federal government, instead of sending help they put up billboard-size signs warning our citizens to stay out of the desert in my county because of dangerous drug and human smuggling and weapons and bandits and all these other things and then, behind that, they drag us into court with the ACLU,” said Babeu, who described the administration’s cooperation with the ACLU against Arizona as “simply outrageous.” He declared, “Our own government has become our enemy and is taking us to court at a time when we need help.”
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